Aerial camera systems are capable of producing large amounts of data during a typical sortie of a survey aircraft, and the data produced is required to be stored on the aircraft until completion of the sortie. In an existing system, the produced survey data is stored on the aircraft using a high-capacity removable flash storage array, and after completion of the sortie the flash storage arrays on which the survey data is stored are sent to a data processing facility for processing.
However, this type of data storage array is relatively expensive and has limited storage capacity, typically of the order of 1.7 TiB, to the extent that multiple data storage arrays are often required in order to carry out an aerial survey. In addition, one such existing data storage array contains 28 flash devices, which creates additional points of failure, potentially leading to data loss, and for this reason dual data storage arrays are often used for redundancy.
Existing data storage arrays are also relatively heavy (about 15 kg) and relatively bulky, resulting in increased handling and shipping charges when the survey aircraft operates remotely from the data processing facility. Operation at a remote location also requires many data storage arrays to be in circulation between the data processing facility and the survey aircraft, and this creates additional costs and operational issues, such as needing to know precisely ahead of time where the aircraft will be in order to ship storage units to the aircraft.
For these reasons, an arrangement has been used wherein a ground station at the remote location is used to retrieve the data from the storage arrays and transfer the data to a more compact lower cost storage medium, such as USB HDD or magnetic tape, and the low cost storage media are then sent to the processing facility.
However, significant additional time is required to transfer the data from the storage arrays to the low cost storage media, and therefore the time taken to ultimately deliver the data to the processing facility is significant, particularly as it is unlikely the data can be transferred to the low cost storage media post-flight in time to make an evening courier pickup.
The time required to transfer the data from the storage arrays to the low cost storage media also causes aircraft movement logistics to be significantly more difficult.